With New START Gone, Arms Control Experts See Era Without Nuclear Guardrails

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 (TodayViralUSA) – The New START treaty, the last remaining agreement limiting U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear forces, has expired. Arms control specialists say its end removes both numerical limits and the verification tools that let each side see what the other was doing.

Signed in 2010 and extended once in 2021, the treaty capped each country at 1,550 deployed strategic warheads, 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles and heavy bombers, and 800 deployed and non-deployed launchers. With no successor in place, the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals have no binding limits for the first time since the early 1970s.

“No more guardrails”

Christine Wormuth, president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative and a former U.S. Army secretary, said in comments reported by NPR that the expiration means there are “no more guardrails” on the two countries’ strategic forces.

Rose Gottemoeller, the chief U.S. negotiator of the treaty, has pointed to how much the arms control era achieved. U.S. and Russian deployed strategic arsenals once peaked at roughly 12,000 warheads each during the Cold War. Successive agreements brought that down to the 1,550 ceiling. Including stockpiled and retired weapons, the two countries held more than 70,000 nuclear weapons in the mid-1980s, compared with a little over 10,000 combined today.

Losing the view inside

Many experts say the treaty’s transparency measures were as valuable as its numerical caps. Matt Korda of the Federation of American Scientists noted that the two governments exchanged more than 25,000 notifications under the agreement, covering movements of missiles, bombers and warheads.

On-site inspections were suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic and never resumed. Russia then suspended its participation in 2023. Even so, analysts said the treaty kept a legal framework, and a shared expectation of restraint, that could have been rebuilt. Without it, military planners on both sides must rely more on worst-case assumptions about the other’s forces.

Russian analysts expressed similar regret. Dmitry Stefanovich, a Moscow-based arms control researcher, described New START as “a good treaty.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said its lapse would leave the world “more dangerous.”

Washington wants a broader deal

President Donald Trump has said he wants a “new, improved, and modernized” agreement and has argued that any future arms control framework should include China. Beijing’s arsenal is much smaller than those of the U.S. and Russia but has been growing. China has consistently rejected trilateral limits, arguing that the two larger nuclear powers should cut first.

Proposals in the final months to keep observing the central limits informally for a year, while talks continued, did not produce a formal arrangement before the deadline.

What to watch

Experts say the immediate risk is not a sudden expansion of arsenals, since building new warheads and delivery systems takes years. Both countries do, however, have the technical ability to “upload” additional warheads onto existing missiles relatively quickly. Analysts will be watching for any such moves, and for signs that either government is planning force increases in its budget.

Many in the arms control community also worry about the broader message. With the U.S. and Russia no longer bound by limits, some analysts fear other nuclear-armed states will feel less pressure to show restraint, at a time when the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists already rates nuclear risk as historically high.